


claim your ghost

by whimsicalimages



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Coping, Depression, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Episode: s08e05 The Bells, Screw Destiny, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-03-07 23:57:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18883924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicalimages/pseuds/whimsicalimages
Summary: The problem is that he’d meant to die, but his wretched heart had sounded in time with the bells:live! Live, live!And some animal part of him had listened.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Uh. Hello. I didn't mean for this to happen! I haven't watched this show in 4 seasons! But here we are. The title is from [the eponymous Iron & Wine song.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K1YTJek2Ik) Eternal thanks to J, M, and others for editing and cheerleading. Find me [here on tumblr](http://keensers.tumblr.com) if you'd like to yell at or with me. As of 6/5/19, this fic is done (I meant it to be 6k words and now it's about 13k words, but, well, what can you do), and I'll be posting updates every few days. 
> 
> Additional warnings: there is some serious suicidal ideation in this fic. If you or a loved one are having thoughts like any of the thoughts Jaime has in the first chapter, please [seek help.](http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/) There are also pretty graphic descriptions of being buried alive; being wounded; grieving and death; and dubious coping mechanisms. If any of that isn't your cup of tea, please take care of yourself and look elsewhere.

“I don’t love you anymore,” he’d told Brienne, and he was lying.

He was leaving Winterfell to die, and that was the truth. Denying Brienne was merely the bravest and worst lie he’d told in his life.

But this way, she could forget him. She wouldn’t grieve for him, for a man so stupid as to break the heart of the truest woman in the Seven Kingdoms. She was stronger than he’d ever been, and she would live, she would go back to her island of green and sparkling blue that he’d glimpsed only from a distance and she would _live,_ and he would never again have to look at the bright light of her eyes and know that he wasn’t fit to come near her.

He deserved the death he was walking into, and she deserved a life he wasn’t equipped to provide, and that was all. Setting fire to his own happiness to give her a chance at finding another, better one for herself – well, it’s a bargain he’s willing to make.

-

Bronn catches up with him his second day traveling on the Kingsroad through the Riverlands, crossbow strapped to his saddlebag. They ride in silence for a few hours, Jaime hoping in vain that Bronn’s horse will tire sooner than his own.

But his luck has never been that good.

“Didn’t think I would see you until after the war,” Jaime says at last.

“I didn’t expect you to go haring off to die so soon when I said that, did I? Thought you’d finally grown a pair and thrown over your crazy sister for the greener fields of Tarth.”

Before he’s completely conscious of it, Jaime has his sword at Bronn’s throat. “Don’t,” he says quietly.

Bronn rolls his eyes but puts his hands up, so Jaime sheathes his sword. The peace lasts five whole minutes.

“If you wanted to die this badly you should have let me kill you in the tavern. I know it’s about defending your mad Queen in King’s Landing like a proper lion or some such shit, but it seems a long way to go just for an unpleasant death. You know the city will burn.”

“Then we’ll burn,” Jaime says simply.

“Not concerned about it, or resigned already? Here’s a thought: you could convince Cersei to give up the throne and beg for mercy and let your brother speak on your behalf, and maybe none of you die, _or_ you could kill her yourself like a man and bend the knee to the Dragon Queen, and only your sister dies. Just as long as one of you survives and I still get my castle,” Bronn suggests.

Jaime frowns. “Tyrion will see to your godsforsaken castle.”

“I prefer to hedge my bets,” Bronn says, grinning like a knife’s edge. “Why do you want it so badly, anyway? What good’s dying going to do you?”

“I deserve it,” Jaime says. “I don’t know what I’ll do when I reach King’s Landing but I won’t hide in the North while Cersei burns. I’ve killed for her and bled for her and I’d do all of it again. There’s no coming back from that, and no begging for mercy. She deserves death and so do I, but she’s my sister. She’s mad, and hateful, but she’s my sister. Do you understand that? I can’t put a sword through her chest. Maybe we both burn at the end of this.” He spreads his hands. “But we’ll burn together, as Lannisters.”

The only sound on the road is the steady pace of their horses – they’ll have to camp for the night soon. He’s ridden far and fast enough that the fields around the road aren’t as trampled as the ones further north, but even here it’ll take years to heal the soil. His horse whinnies.

“So you’re a coward, after all,” Bronn says at last.

Jaime whirls on him in outrage.

Bronn scoffs. “You really want to throw yourself on Cersei’s self-made funeral pyre, you’re welcome to it, but don’t pretend it’s about Lannister bravery or about _deserving_ ,” he says. “Nobody gets what they deserve, you miserable fuck. I saw you happy at Wintertown. You were happy! Now, don’t get me wrong, it was disgusting to lay my eyes on. You think you deserved that happiness for even a month, a day? You didn’t, and you know it, and I’d wager that’s why you ripped it away. Felt too guilty, didn’t you, sitting up there and fucking a good woman while your crazy sister dug her own grave, and now you’ll march into death to get free of that guilt.”

“Then I’ll march into death! I’m not afraid of it. I deserve it,” Jaime repeats.

“Shut up! How about instead you tell Cersei to stand down and maybe King’s Landing doesn’t get sacked by a huge fucking dragon, all your idiot soldiers and smallfolk survive, and we take apart the fucking Throne and use the swords for toothpicks, eh? That might not be how you want to end this or what you think you deserve, but it sounds like that’s what everyone else _deserves_ from you.”

Jaime grits his teeth. “Cersei sent the Mountain after me the last time I tried to convince her of anything. She won’t bend the knee to a Targaryen, or to anyone.”

“She hadn’t been face-to-face with a dragon then, had she?” Bronn shakes his head. “Of course she won’t stand down if she thinks she has nothing to lose. She hates your brother, and everybody else who’s close enough to talk to her is either too afraid to or they’re trying to kill her. If you’re not going to kill her, and you’re not trying to convince her, and you want to die, you’ll get all your wishes soon enough. But don’t tell me any of that just about the balancing of the bloody scales, where if you die then everything is suddenly better. That’s not how the world works.”

“I owe a debt,” Jaime says. “ _We_ owe a debt for all our crimes, and we’ll pay it with our lives.”

Bronn actually stops his horse to stare at Jaime. “You owe a debt? For fuck’s sake, to who?”

“All Westeros!” Jaime snaps. “You think I don’t know what I’ve done, what I owe? I thought I would pay it defending the North, and now I know I’ll pay it defending King’s Landing.”

“You think you can pay it by dying? Stupid twat. You really are a coward, _Ser_ Jaime. What about the debt you owe the Starks? The debt you owe whoever’s left in your armies, your smallfolk? The debt you owe your Lady of Tarth? Those won’t get paid if you’re rotting in the ground. Easier to run towards a glorious death than to try and help people in life, that’s what all you highborn types think.”

Jaime looks away, back to the road stretching before them. “What do you know about debts or Great Houses? You’re a sellsword, Ser Bronn of the Blackwater.”

Bronn laughs in his face. “You’re right, I’m a sellsword. I know that puts an end to any argument in your books. I don’t know much about noble blood and what I do know doesn’t sound appealing. But I do know you and your sister aren’t _good people_. Your brother’s smarter, sure, but his hands are just as dirty as yours, or hers, or mine. We’re all in the fucking mud, hoping death will spare us until tomorrow, except you, because you think it’ll wipe your slate clean. It won’t. You die at the end of this road, and it won’t pay off any debts. It won’t buy you any honor. You’ll just be dead, and dead men can’t pay what they owe.” He crosses his arms. “Good fucking luck.”

Jaime opens his mouth to say something he hasn’t thought out, but Bronn has already turned his horse around to ride north as the light fades.

Jaime pushes the words down. He rides on.

-

Tyrion stops before he leaves, and says without turning around: “You’ve always been a terrible liar. Ring the bells, Jaime. Don’t throw all those lives away.”

-

He thinks of it for an instant when he sees Cersei again, thinks of how easy it would be to put a sword through her chest and kill the madness, but she’s turning to him looking terrified and he can’t do it. Maybe if he were a better man, he could, but he’s not.

The bells are ringing all across the city, now. He’s done the job he promised Tyrion he’d do, and now he can die. Both of them can. The Keep is crumbling around them, faster than they could hope to outrun and reach Tyrion’s dinghy.

But he’s ready, he thinks. He’s been ready since he walked away from Brienne and ruined the only good thing in his life, the only uncomplicated happiness. He’d put it in the ground himself.

Cersei looks smaller than she stood two months ago, already grieving. “I want our baby to live,” she says, over and over. Putting a sword through her heart would be less painful than getting crushed, but he can’t do it.

What does it matter? They’re already dead. Two lions killed by an avalanche.

She says it again, and then she says nothing at all, and he hears nothing at all, and he feels absolutely empty, like some great hand has scooped out his chest and he’s finally been purged of all the blood that made him.

-

The first thing he knows is pain – his entire body is a bruise and he can’t see anything. If this is what death is, he’s in for an eternity of boredom, but he thinks death hasn’t come for him yet despite his best efforts.

“Cersei?” he whispers. There’s no answer, and he really does feel like the stupidest Lannister for doubting it even for a moment. Cersei is dead. Their unborn child is dead, and Cersei is dead. The bells are still ringing, and Cersei is dead.

His chest is a hollow ache, but he can hear his heartbeat in his own ears. How is that possible?

He sits up, ignoring the stabbing pain in his head, the broken ankle he’s certain of, and the two broken ribs he suspects. The weapons he’d taken along his way through the city are lost to him, and every time he moves he hears rubble shifting.

His instincts don’t let him stay still – his wretched heart still sounds in time with the bells: _live! Live, live!_

He’d meant to die, but he can’t shut it out.

Moving is a world of agony and there’s no light to see by, so he closes his eyes to make the dark less disconcerting, so that he can breathe through the instinctive, irrational fear. This is worse than battle – at least in battle he’s in constant motion. If there’s no way out, he’ll run out of air and die. If there’s a way out but it’s too small for him, he’ll die of thirst. If he shifts wrong, the rock above him will collapse and kill him. He’d sooner bash his own head in. Then Bronn would really be proud.

He feels around himself with his hand, and crawls forward little by little. He opens his eyes and thinks maybe he sees light, and then it fades, and then reappears from a different point, so he ignores it, trusting his fingers more. He pushes aside pieces of stonework and the ceiling doesn’t fall on him, so he moves again. He loses track of how much time he spends inching ahead on hand and knees; his false hand must have been knocked off when he fell. He’s glad for a petty moment that Widow’s Wail was taken from him. Valyrian steel shouldn’t be buried beyond recovery under stone.

His breathing is steady and loud in his ears.

Control your breathing, control your body, Ser Arthur Dayne had told him once. Control your body, control the fight.

It hadn’t been a fight he wanted to win, but some animal part of him refuses this death, on his knees and covered in dirt. Maybe the gods he’s never really believed in want him to feel like a worm in the bowels of the earth before finally killing him, but his traitorous body won’t accept it this way. Every inch of him rebels against it, against the pain and the filth and the voice in his mind that says: you can lie down here to rest. Why bother fighting it? What’s left, what are you good for? What else can you do, but die?

He thinks of blue eyes, blue like the ocean in the summer. Blue like gemstones hidden in a vault. A furious voice telling him to live.  

He knows he should have died with Cersei. He wanted to die with Cersei. He buried his happiness so he could die with Cersei, rode south and fought and killed for it, walked away from a good woman for it, because it was his atonement, it was what he deserved.

But nobody gets what they deserve, Bronn had said.

Dead men can’t pay what they owe.

He keeps moving until it becomes mindless, forward and forward and forward. He can feel the wetness of blood on his cheek and at his side where Euron Greyjoy had wounded him. The dark is too complete for his eyes to adjust to. Twice, and then three times, pieces of rock knock into his chest and his ankle and he has to stop to hold in the screaming, rocking back and forth like a child, or a madman. His bones protest against motion and against stillness.

He doesn’t know how long he’s there, crawling through the darkness, before he sees the glow of firelight silhouetting three human shapes. He thinks he’s imagining it until he feels the tunnel smooth out under his fingers, hears the sound of quiet voices.

He tries to get up to stand and limp along on his ankle and can’t find the strength for more than two steps, but at least there’s light again.

He thinks: at least I won’t die on my knees in the dark.

A woman’s voice with a Dornish accent is yelling something about bandages, then, but he stumbles and lets it fade. The bells – the bells have stopped ringing.


	2. Chapter 2

When he was seven, he’d jumped off a cliff at Casterly Rock. He hadn’t wanted to die then – he doesn’t think he understood what death meant, so young. Their mother was there one day, belly big with Tyrion, and gone the next. All she left was a squalling babe with a large head and clever eyes that Tywin and Cersei hated. There was no trace of her death besides the emptiness where she had been.

So when he jumped off the cliff, he hadn’t really been thinking about how fragile his bones were, or how the water would feel solid from so far up, or the breathtaking cold of the sea in autumn. He only remembers a crystalline certainty that for a few moments he would fly, followed by the pain of impact.

When he’d come to, half-drowned and coughing, he realized that one of their miners had seen him sink and dragged him to the rocky shore.

“Idiot child,” the man had said. “Do you know how many people would die for your foolishness if your father found you drowned near the mineshafts?”

“Don’t call me that,” Jaime had said, and then added, “and I didn’t drown.”

“But for the grace of the Seven, you would have,” his bitter rescuer had said. “Listen here, now. All you’ve got in this life is what you do with it, boy. Dash it on the rocks, and it’s gone forever.”

-

He wakes up alone in a softer bed than he’s had since leaving the North, and doesn’t realize until he tries to shift that his hand is cuffed to it. There’s a splint on his ankle and a thick bandage wrapped around his chest, and his head feels like it’s been stuffed full of cotton.

A young man with a silver Maester’s chain bustles into the room. Jaime opens his mouth to speak but coughs instead, and the Maester startles and turns to him. “You’re awake. How are you feeling?”

Jaime raises his arm, pointedly jingling the chain.

The Maester’s pleasant smile hardens. “You’ll have to pardon me for taking liberties, but you attacked us the first three times you woke up before we strapped you in and gave you a sleeping draught. I’ll get the key once I know you’re lucid enough to take milk of the poppy of your own accord.”

Jaime lets his arm fall. “I’m lucid, but I won’t take it,” he says, voice hoarse from disuse. “Where am I?”

“I’m surprised you’re lucid at all, with your injuries,” the Maester says. “You’re in the Third Healing House at Gulltown. I’m Maester Rin and I’ve been charged with your care. You were brought here a sennight ago by a family of Dornish merchants fleeing the Burning of King’s Landing.”

The bells – the Keep collapsing. Fear written all over Cersei’s face. Crawling through stone and wood and ash, his heart somehow still beating, desperately holding onto a memory of blue, blue, blue eyes.

He blinks. “I don’t remember the journey,” he says.

“They said you were unconscious for most of it,” Maester Rin says. “If you’d spent that time on horseback instead of on a ship, you would have died. It was kind of them to bring you along when they sailed.”

“Kind pirates,” Jaime says.

“Merchants,” the Maester insists.

“Daenerys Targaryen burned every ship in that port. No honest merchant could have found a way out, but pirates from the Stepstones dock by the caves east of the city.”

“I wouldn’t know.” The Maester hesitates, glances at the cuff around Jaime’s wrist, and continues. “I’m surprised you do, Ser Jaime.”

He can hear the cry of the gulls outside the small window, the soft footsteps of other Maesters in the hall. Fainter, in the distance, the lapping of the waves against the low stone seawall that he knows rings Gulltown.

“Don’t call me that,” he says, and turns away, closing his eyes.

-

The next time he wakes up, he’s been unchained from the bed and there’s a bowl of broth still steaming on the nightstand. He doesn’t feel hungry until he takes a sip, and then he has to force himself to go slowly so that he doesn’t immediately bring it back up; he remembers what the ache of eating again after starving is like.

He eats mechanically, thoughts running in useless circles. Who had brought him here? Who would rescue a man who was obviously Jaime Lannister from King’s Landing and bring him all the way to a Gulltown healing house? He had no gold to pay his way and no weapons, and Daenerys Targaryen had surely put a bounty on his head. Had he lived through the Long Night, through the Red Keep falling on his head, just to die in a backwater port in the Vale?

The light filtering in through the window tells him it’s late afternoon, and he considers trying to leave the room but everything begins to spin with pain when he puts his feet on the ground, so he lies back down. At least, he supposes, the bed is comfortable.

-

A girl of maybe one-and-ten is at his bedside after he’s been there five days, going by the amount of meals he’s been given while awake.

Jaime squints at her. She stares back without shame, looking fascinated by his unkempt appearance. He must look like a madman.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

He sighs, letting his head fall back to the pillow. “I don’t have one,” he says.

There is silence for a few blissful moments as the girl digests this. She grins suddenly. “Everyone needs a name. I could give you one, if you don’t have one,” she suggests. “Mine is Wylla.”

Gods save him from eager children. “It’s Arthur. My name is Arthur,” he says. Arthur Dayne will have to forgive him, but he thinks it’ll be low on the list of things he’d ask forgiveness for in the unlikely event that he’ll end up in the same place as Dayne when he dies.

“That’s a Dornish name,” Wylla says. “Are you from Dorne?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Very sure.”

“I bet if you say you’re from Dorne you can sail back with us.”

Jaime gives in. “Why would I want to do that?”

“My brother in Sunspear has a talent for making tools that can be used with injuries like yours,” a woman’s voice says, and then the woman herself comes through the doorway. She looks just like the girl, but the tight curls of her hair are beginning to grey. She’s whipcord thin, probably a year or two older than Tyrion, and she has the look of someone who’s very, very good with a knife. “And anyone capable of working a field, laying bricks or defending a house will find a use somewhere in Dorne. We don’t waste people.” She shakes her head at Wylla. “Go on, get back to your brothers.”

“I can’t do any of those things,” Jaime says once the girl is gone.

“I doubt that’s true, but you can sail with us back to the capital and find out. Consider it payment for taking you with us from King’s Landing.”

“I have no payment for you. I wish you hadn’t taken me,” Jaime blurts out before he can stop himself.

The woman stares at him.

Jaime resists the urge to cover his face with his hand. “Look,” he says. “I don’t know what you thought you were getting when you dragged me with you from that place, but I have no money to pay you with, no lands or titles or weapons to barter with, I didn’t even mean to survive that day, and I’m frankly surprised I didn’t die on the way here.”

“I didn’t put you on our boat thinking of payment, Ser—”

“Not Ser,” Jaime interrupts. “Just Arthur.”

“Arthur, then,” she agrees without missing a beat. “My name is Ymra, Arthur. You won’t believe me, but when we saw you walk out of the Red Keep, we weren’t thinking of payment. We were thinking of getting as far away as possible from the burning city, and we saw a man who looked like he’d perish if we left him. It took me a sennight sailing and then two days here to even realize who you were.”

“And who is that?”

“A man looking for punishment,” she tells him bluntly. “The rest hardly matters. You can leave it behind if you want – you can leave almost anything behind, if you want to. I’ve met a thousand men like you. I married a man like you when I was young and foolish and in love, and it took years for him to stop looking for a sword to fall on. He’s waiting for me on the banks of the Greenblood with our youngest child. There’s space enough in the world for you, _Arthur_. You’re but one man.”

Jaime swallows and says nothing.

She watches him, and tilts her head. “So, then. What’s your plan?”

“I don’t have one,” Jaime says, too honest.

“You can come aboard my ship. Come to Dorne.”

“What would I do on your ship? What would I do in Dorne, of all places?”

She shrugs. “You can defend me and mine from harm on the water, until we make port at Sunspear. You can find a knight’s work with the nobles, there aren’t many capable swordsmen left in Dorne. Or in Westeros. We’ve some weapons, but my sons are sailors, not soldiers, and their skill won’t save us from any rogue ironborn looking for vengeance. Our craft is built for speedy escapes, not battle.”

“What’s your cargo?” Jaime asks.

“Medicine,” Ymra says. “For those who need it.”

Kind pirates. Jaime closes his eyes. He thinks: maybe I can do this before I rest. A debt is owed, and must be paid.

“I’ll sail,” he says.

She nods. “Welcome, then.”

“Wait,” Jaime says as she’s turning to leave.

She looks back, raising an eyebrow.

“What’s the name of your ship?”

Ymra’s grin is as sharp as her daughter’s. “The _Dawn Wind_.”

-

Maester Rin declares him fit to sail in two sennights’ time, with an admonition to keep wearing the splint on his ankle and not to put weight on his chest.

“You’re lucky you survived at all,” the Maester says. “Don’t test it by re-breaking your bones.”

He doesn’t feel very lucky, but he doesn’t think the Maester will appreciate that sentiment after all his work piecing Jaime back together.

Ymra gives him a sword taken from gods-know-where and largely leaves him alone. Her sons Trystane and Rhodri seem only slightly less wary of him than the rest of the crew, who all give a wide berth to the man with a cane, a sword at his hip, and one hand for both.

Jaime keeps to himself, but Wylla takes to following him when he looks for places to hide, despite his attempts to seem uninteresting.

“What happened to your hand, Arthur?” she asks.

“A bad man cut it off,” Jaime says.

“Are you getting a new one?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You could get a hook if you don’t want a new hand. My uncle Dai has a hook and he makes hooks for sailors. He says it’s better than a hand because you can kill people with it, although he also says I can’t repeat that if my mother is around.”

“Your mother _is_ around.”

“Not right now. Will you teach me how to fight? Mother gave you a sword so you must be able to fight.”

He pauses. “Why do you want to know how to fight?”

Wylla scowls. “Because I want to! My mother says I’m too young to learn. She hasn’t taught my brothers either, though, and they’ve almost twenty years each!”

Jaime privately thinks that’s a few years’ overestimation, but he ignores his ankle and kneels down to be on eye-level with the girl. “But why do you want to know how to fight?”

“Because I want to protect my family. Nobody expects a girl to be able to,” she says. “But my mother can use a sword, and I want to, too. The boys in Gulltown said there was still fighting in Blackwater Bay and that I’m just a little girl who’ll get stolen away by the ironborn, but I’m old enough to defend myself. I want to.”

“The best fighter I’ve ever met was a girl, and a knight to boot,” Jaime says gravely. “So those boys in Gulltown didn’t know what they were talking about.”

“Girls can’t be knights.”

“Well, Brienne of Tarth is a knight, and woe betide anyone who would try and take that from her,” Jaime says, only tripping a little over her name. He has to remind himself that he can say it as many times as he wants, here, and he won’t be giving anything away. Nobody will send whispers to Cersei about it because Cersei isn’t there to hear them; Brienne herself won’t know. Enough people will say her name in the years to come. It’ll be in the songs for ages, even the songs that one-handed peasants sing.

Ser Brienne Defends the North is what men will sing on their way to great battles. Ser Brienne of the Queensguard. The Knighting of Brienne of Tarth. If all the good anyone remembers of him is a secondary role in such a song, he thinks he could be content with that.

Wylla eyes him. “So I could be a knight?”

“You could be.”

“I need to learn to fight first.”

Determined child. She reminds him of Myrcella. “Then I suppose I’ll need to teach you.”

-

Ten days pass on the ship before he manages to ask Ymra, “Who serves as Hand of the Queen?”

She doesn’t ask why, doesn’t ask anything at all, just looks him in the eye and says, “Tyrion Lannister.”

That night is the first time he lets himself weep, sobbing quietly into his fist after most of the men have fallen asleep. His brother lives. He’s not the last, after all, what’s left of the Lannisters isn’t only shame and dishonor and too much gods-damned pride, it’s cleverness and diplomacy and all the things his brother has always been better than him at, more like their father was. All the things he’d thought would kill Tyrion, and in the end they’ve saved him. Tywin would roll in his grave.

Ymra’s crew grows used to his presence and some of the bolder ones begin giving him basic tasks – the quartermaster sets him to counting inventory, and Rhodri teaches him how to tie sailor’s knots one-handed.

By the time they reach the Stepstones, he’s taught Wylla the very basics of swordfighting. She takes to it like he imagines Brienne must have taken to it once, although Wylla is still small – smaller than Arya Stark was at her sister’s betrothal to Joffrey. She really might be a knight one day, although he doesn’t know who would knight a common girl from a family of pirates.

Then again, he doesn’t think anyone expected a highborn lady to become a knight, either, but it had been the only sensible, honorable thing to do.

-

When they dock at Bloodstone to trade and take on cargo before the last stretch of sailing to Sunspear, Ymra sits down next to him while the crew is eating. “You’ve been teaching my daughter how to use a sword,” she says.

“I can stop if you want me to,” he says. He’ll stop one way or another soon enough. The waters have been quiet – there’s no call for a soldier on this ship once it reaches its home port, and he doesn’t know where they’re headed next.

“You’re a good teacher. Patient. I don’t think I would be. I see too much of myself in her.”

“Parents are always their own harshest critics,” he says, feeling the ghost of a smile come to his face.

They chew in silence for a time.

“You can travel on with us, if you like, you know,” Ymra offers.

“I still can’t offer your crew anything,” Jaime points out.

Ymra smiles. “You’re teaching my daughter to fight. We’ll stay a month at Sunspear, but we have business in Oldtown before we come home for pearl season. The Maesters there trade their medicines for wine, but there’s more work for a swordsman there than in Sunspear.”

“There’s nothing for me in Oldtown,” Jaime says.

“Where is there something for you?”

Tarth, he doesn’t say. He barely even lets himself think it; it mightn’t be true, anyway. Wanting is dangerous, and having even more so, and having but throwing away – he’s never expected to come back from that. He held a whole mine of sapphires in his grasp and tossed it aside because he couldn’t stand the holding, the knowledge of just how unworthy he was. Why would it be offered to him again when he’d squandered it?

“I don’t know,” he says instead. “Didn’t think I’d be alive this long, to be honest, so I hadn’t really planned this far.”

Ymra snorts. “Men,” she says dismissively, shaking her head. “Always running away when you should be running towards. Making things so much harder than they need to be. Doesn’t life already have enough trials to fight through? Come to Oldtown, then, Arthur. Keep teaching my daughter the sword. Learn to use a hook, if you like – people tell me my brother makes the best ones this side of the Narrow Sea. Maybe you’ll figure the rest out along the way.”


	3. Chapter 3

Ymra is true to her word – she introduces Jaime to her brother Dai, who puts him up above his smithy while he’s making something that will fit Jaime’s stump. He insists that Jaime lodge for free so long as he’s teaching Wylla to fight, confirming Jaime’s long-held belief that all Dornishmen are a little bit mad. Who puts up a disreputable-looking swordsman with one hand for the price of teaching an eleven-year-old the blade?

Dai himself wears a complicated contraption capable of grasping his tongs when he’s working, but otherwise uses a hook for a left hand. He’s deft with it in a way Jaime never was with the golden hand.

“It’s practical, is what it is,” he cheerfully tells Jaime. “I was twenty-and-one and just married when a younger apprentice at my master’s smithy fell into me, knocked me right into the forge-fire. Lucky all I lost was the hand, but a hook has done me well enough all these years, though I’m no soldier like you, Ser.”

Perhaps there’s something obvious to the eye about his godsforsaken noble blood, that people keep taking him for a knight. His father had always said that soldiers carry themselves differently, but any man can be a soldier, and his father had said a lot of things that turned out to be complete shit. Maybe he ought to let his hair and beard grow out enough that he looks like a shaggy Northman.

“Not Ser,” he corrects. “Just Arthur.”

Dai hums noncommittally. “Was a great Dornishman by that name, some years ago. Ser Arthur Dayne, served in the Kingsguard of the Mad King. Died fighting in the Red Mountains, from what I’ve heard.”

Jaime swallows to keep his throat from closing up. He’d chosen the name, but he hadn’t expected anyone to make the connection. “I know,” he says. “I met him, as a boy.” He taught me everything I know about honor, and oaths, and being a good man, he doesn’t say.

“I believe it. He was a man of the people,” Dai says. “I hope the new Queen is like that. I should like to have my daughter meet her, and my nieces.”

Jaime tries not to wince. The new Queen tried to kill him more than once, succeeded in killing Cersei, and reduced a large portion of King’s Landing to ash, all for the sake of that accursed fucking throne. “Maybe Wylla can be in her Queensguard,” Jaime says. He hopes not.

Dai laughs. “That’d be a thing to see! A new age. A Queen with no consort and a Queensguard of women. You know, most of us here in Dorne aren’t so set in our ways, but I think the Martells’ Maester almost threw himself off Spear Tower when he heard they’d made a woman knight.”

A thousand things fly through Jaime’s head. “Oh?” he manages, knowing he must sound like an idiot.

“Aye,” Dai says. “I expect you were still at sea with Ymra. The Lady of Tarth was asked to command the Queensguard at the Dragon Queen’s Great Council, but she refused. In front of all those nobles, too. I heard she swore to the Queen in the North instead.”

“I see,” Jaime says, although he doesn’t. He tries and fails to stifle the question that wants to come out. “Do you know why she refused?”

Dai shrugs. “Who am I to know the thoughts of lords and ladies? I only hear this much because my daughter gossips with the Martell servants. I’m sure this Lady Brienne of Tarth had her reasons.”

“Ser Brienne,” Jaime says absently.

“Hm?”

“She’s been knighted, so her proper title is Ser Brienne of Tarth.”

Dai tilts his head. “Ser Brienne of Tarth,” he agrees. He grins, and claps Jaime on the back. “I’ll have a hook for you before you sail for Oldtown.”

-

Wylla appears at the smithy the day before they mean to sail and throws herself at Dai, who’s had Jaime sharpening various weapons in the corner for the past few days. It makes him feel like a squire again, but the work is satisfying. He’s missed taking care of a sword worth the effort.

“Uncle Dai!” Wylla calls. “When will you give Arthur his hook?”

“When it’s ready, Wylla,” Dai replies.

Trystane, the quieter of Wylla’s two older brothers, appears behind her. “My mother has sent us to ask that you come to dinner with our family,” he tells Jaime. “My father is a good cook. And he wants to meet the man who’s been teaching Wylla to fight.”

Surely it isn’t something that the whole family need act so grateful for, Jaime thinks. Ymra clearly knows how to use a blade. But he doesn’t ask, not wanting to test their bewildering kindness.

Ymra’s husband Anders is indeed a good cook, and their home is a low stone building near a street full of inns. Outside, there are fruit vendors chewing sourleaf and hawking end-of-the-day prices, and children kicking around an empty bottle. Inside, there are Ymra’s four children, her husband, and Jaime, who feels as if he’s stepped into a fairytale he would have heard from a septa as a boy, one where ordinary people get to be happy for no reason besides being alive and together. Is it really so easy, that all you need to do to hold joy in your hands is promise not to let it go?

He makes his excuses as soon as he can, after Ymra has extracted a promise that Jaime will meet them on the docks in the morning, but Anders catches up to him outside before he’s gotten very far.

“Mind if I walk with you?”

“Not at all,” Jaime says, unwilling to show his trepidation.

There’s silence for a time. Anders is as good as Ymra at letting silence sit on its own. Jaime listens to the vendors declaring last call and the crying of the gulls, constant here and louder than in King’s Landing. With a pang, he remembers how viscerally strange it felt to be so far from the sea when he’d been in Winterfell. Brienne must have felt it too, after growing up on Tarth, but he’d never asked. He wishes, inanely, that he’d asked.

“Thank you for teaching my daughter,” Anders says eventually. “My wife knows how to fight, as do I, but it’s – the way we were raised, the way we learned to fight, we wouldn’t have been good teachers. We thought it would be enough if one of us was always with them, but the world is too big for that.”

In the half-light of the evening, the man looks like a Dornish Lord Jaime had seen once, when he was still a squire. He hadn’t noticed the resemblance before.

“Wylla has a lot of talent,” Jaime says. “She’s too brash, but I was brash when I was that young, too.”

“But you were a boy, so your brashness meant you were sent to squire early,” Anders says.

“Yes,” Jaime confirms absently, and then startles. “How did you know that?”

Anders waves a hand. “Seen enough fighting to know what an old hunter looks like,” he says. “Took me a long time to walk away from living like that. Longer than Ymra deserved, but she loved me through it, even when she was miles away thieving on the water and I was fighting you Northerners in the red sands.” He huffs a laugh when he sees Jaime’s indignant expression at being called a Northerner. “You’re all Northerners to a Dornishman.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before.”

“Stay here and you’ll have to get used to it. You don’t have the bearing to pass as one of us.”

He’s right, of course, for all that Jaime’s thought of himself as a southerner his whole life. He has no argument to make. “So why did you give up being a soldier?” he asks instead.

Anders smiles, wide and honest. “I wanted to do right by Ymra, and I couldn’t if I was off soldiering in other men’s wars, making even more enemies than Ymra already had from her trade. We married young and then we were apart for years after that, but I was always going to choose her, in the end, when I had to choose. There’s no better woman in the world, not for me. When it came down to it, I could have a fight or I could have a love, a life. What kind of fool would I be if I’d chosen the fight?”

-

He’s loading bags onto the ship when he hears a child’s scream – _Wylla’s_ scream, and he’s running before he’s entirely conscious of it. He flies around a corner to see one man swearing profusely and holding his arm, and another carrying Wylla over his shoulder as she kicks at him, screaming and biting, and Jaime should have at least found a dagger for her somewhere but he didn’t, he didn’t, and all he can see for a moment is Myrcella bleeding in his arms so he runs the man through without even stopping to think beyond _no, not today._ Wylla drops to the ground and Jaime is already turning his sword on the other man, but there’s no need because Trystane has appeared, looking absolutely infuriated, in time to ram a pan down on the would-be kidnapper’s head.

Jaime lets his sword fall as he falls to his knees by Wylla’s side and takes her shoulders as gently as he can. She looks dazed, but he can’t see any blood on her. “Wylla, are you alright?”

“Arthur?” she asks, and then focuses on him. “That man said I was a demon-child and my mother was a—”

She breaks off and glances at the bodies on the ground. Jaime touches her cheek, turns her head away. “No, don’t look at them, sweetling, look at me,” he says. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”

“I’m not hurt,” Wylla says, and then looks at Trystane, who has knelt at her other side and taken her hands. “They didn’t get to hurt me. They said they were going to, because of our parents.”

“They won’t,” Trystane says, pressing her close to his chest. “They won’t hurt you or anyone else. Uncle Arthur made sure they wouldn’t, hm?”

It takes a second to settle in Jaime’s mind, and he has to take a deep breath to push down the nonsensical tears that spring to his eyes.

Wylla hugs Trystane and then leaps at Jaime, squeezing his ribs hard enough that he remembers exactly where they’d been broken. He pats her head. “Not so hard,” he says.

She relents, looking unapologetic. “Thank you,” she says, and grins. “Uncle Arthur.”

Jaime isn’t capable of thinking about that and remaining sane, so he doesn’t acknowledge it. “I’ll have to get you a dagger, so from now on you can protect yourself. Or you can use a frypan, like your brother.”

Trystane shrugs. “It worked well enough.”

-

“If you’ve been trying to convince anyone you’re a terrible man, you’ve not done a very good job of it,” Ymra tells him when he wakes up the next morning, startling him in his bunk. “You know, I’ve half a mind to send her to squire with _you_ when you decide to get yourself to wherever you’re going.”

“I don’t know where I’m going,” Jaime says, then halfheartedly adds on, “And I can’t take a squire, I’m not a knight.”

“Isn’t there something in the oaths about lying? Or at least about lying so badly?” Ymra shakes her head. Her gaze turns serious. “Thank you.”

He’s been sincerely thanked more times in the last few months than he’d probably been his whole forty years before, and each one makes him feel strange in his own skin. When did he start to think goodness was worth protecting again? Why? For so long he’d fought for loyalty alone and thought it entirely natural. A lion protects only his pride; a Lannister only his family. Was changing that as simple as leaving behind a name? He swallows. “You’re welcome,” he says.

Ymra eyes him. “Time passes quickly, but healing is slow, Arthur. You know you’ll have to relearn to walk before you can run.”

“That seems overly cryptic,” Jaime says, back on familiar footing.

Ymra smacks him lightly in the arm. “ _When_ you decide to get yourself to wherever you’re going,” she repeats. “Take the time to feel the earth under your feet. The rest will come.”

Jaime studies the ceiling for answers, but there aren’t any there, and there’s only one he can give. “Yes,” he says, an oath. “All right.”

-

Wylla’s brothers warm to him after that, and by the time he’s giving Wylla her final sword lesson they watch him with obvious curiosity.

“You know, any public house in Oldtown will be glad to have you guarding its doors, especially if you start using the hook to fight,” Rhodri tells him afterwards. “Or you could teach the sword. You’re a good instructor.”

Ser Jaime Lannister, Kingslayer and protector of public houses. Teacher of children. Cersei would have laughed and laughed, but he gets the oddest sense that Brienne would be pleased.

-

Ser Brienne of Tarth is setting up camp near Storm’s End and making ready to sail for Tarth in the morning when a raven finds her, bearing a letter written in Lord Tyrion’s distinctive hand.

_Ser Brienne,_

_I have heard whispers from Dorne and the Reach about a one-handed sellsword who calls himself Arthur and has traveled with a group of pirates believed to be affiliated with a minor branch of House Dalt. My man in the Citadel at Oldtown says he overheard him ask the crier for news of Tarth._

_~~If you see my brother~~ _

_~~If you see him alive, please~~ _

_Ser Bronn has left for Oldtown on the Roseroad. I will write to you if I receive more information._

_Good fortune,_

_Lord Tyrion Lannister_

_Hand of the Queen, Daenerys Stormborn_

Ser Podrick Payne, now a knight in his own right and sworn to the service of House Tarth, sees Brienne’s knees buckle when she reads the letter, and runs over to help his Lady up.

“I’m alright, Pod,” she says, smiling a smile that Podrick hasn’t seen since they left Winterfell.

“If you say so, Ser,” he agrees, eyeing her suspiciously.

She hands him the letter, saying nothing.

Podrick reads it, eyes growing wide. “Oh,” he says.

“Yes,” Brienne says. “Oh.”

-

Rhodri is right, and it’s easy enough to find work as a night guard at a tavern in Oldtown. The barkeep lets rooms above so Jaime sleeps in a bed more often than not for the first time in what feels like a decade. He tries not to count the time, but is uncomfortably aware of it. He left Winterfell more than half a year ago.

The street urchins begin to recognize him after he runs off a shariff beating a man in front of the tavern, and they nod at him whenever he walks by. The crier knows him only as the man who asks once every few days for news of Tarth, and even the Maesters don’t seem to notice anything strange or out of place about him.

He learns to use the hook, grows accustomed to it day by day, and is pleased to learn for himself that it _is_ far more practical than the hand was. The barkeep’s two-year-old daughter takes a shine to him and calls him “Arfur,” and tugs on Jaime’s overgrown hair when she sits on his shoulders. He thinks less and less about what Cersei would say.

On the nights that the tavern closes early, the barkeep and her husband put away their sweet wines and ply him with a nice dark Dornish red and ask about the war, and it doesn’t hurt to speak about anymore, not to people who had nothing to do with any of it.

Much of it feels like it happened to another man, but for the bright sparks of memories made at Brienne’s side – her sword hand rough against his cheek, her breaths aligned with his own. The disgruntled crease between her eyebrows in her sleep that he’d always wanted to smooth out with his thumb.  Those aren’t the stories he tells; they aren’t for anyone but him.

Instead, he talks in vague terms about his brother working to restore the capital and tells tales about the brave soldiers who’d died in the North. He talks about fighting dead men and living men and the White Walkers in between, and winning battles with no bloodshed at all. He talks about the spiced wine of the North, and about getting stung by bees for stealing honeycomb from their hive as a child, and about the first time he saw snow as a squire. He talks about being saved from a burning city by pirates. He talks about seeing a dragon take flight.

The whole time he thinks of blue eyes, and he lets himself imagine they’re proud of him.


	4. Chapter 4

“Jaime fucking Lannister,” a voice says, startling him from his thoughts near the end of the night, nearing four full moons after he arrives in Oldtown.

He turns, and Bronn is there in finer clothes than he’s ever seen him since King’s Landing, years ago. It’s – he doesn’t expect the feeling, but he’s glad that Bronn’s alive.

“I don’t go by that name here,” Jaime says, but reaches out a hand to shake.

“Stupid cunt,” Bronn says, in what seems to be an affectionate tone, and clasps Jaime’s hand. “You can’t hide from it forever. Lord Protector of the local tavern, now? Guess dying really takes it out of a man.”

“I didn’t die,” Jaime points out needlessly. “Though I probably should have. Are you here to finish the job?”

Bronn shrugs. “Not today. And all of us who fought should have died twelve times over by now,” he says. “You’re not special for living, you wouldn’t have been special for dying. Enough of us did both.”

“I meant to,” Jaime says. “When you saw me on the Kingsroad.”

“I remember,” Bronn says. “By my count, everyone and their mother has tried to do you in, including you, and you’re still here with the rest of us. Seems a bit unfair, if I’m to be honest.”

Jaime’s mouth twitches. “The gods aren’t fair.”

“The gods,” Bronn mocks. “You and I both know the gods have nothing to do with it. What are you doing here, o Lion of Lannister?”

Jaime gestures behind him. “Guarding the tavern?”

“No,” Bronn says, shaking his head. “What are you doing here, in Oldtown? Wallowing? Waiting for some sort of signal that isn’t going to come to tell you that you’re done atoning and you can leave this shithole?”

“I’ve grown quite fond of it,” Jaime says. He has, at that; it feels good to be known by the stones of a city where he hasn’t killed anyone and where nobody has tried to kill him. Where people think of him as an ordinary soldier, back from the war. A southerner like them, albeit one whose mannerisms apparently still give away his noble birth.

“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of staying. When are you sailing for Tarth?”

“I wasn’t planning on sailing. The Roseroad is kind enough to travelers.”

Bronn frowns mightily. “Well, what are you waiting for, then?”

Jaime hesitates. “I’m not waiting for anything,” he says, but that isn’t right. “I’m waiting until I know I can be a better man than I was.” It sounds much more trite when he says it out loud, and Bronn looks unimpressed. Jaime tries again. “I can’t go if I’ll only hurt her again. I left hoping that she would find happiness without me.”

“Aye, that’s very noble,” Bronn says. “No way to hurt Brienne of bloody Tarth if she still thinks you’re a dead man.”

Jaime looks away. “You know I’m far worse than she deserves. She should have someone with two hands, someone younger, someone who hasn’t raked his honor through the dirt again and again and again, who didn’t throw aside the best woman in Westeros for the worst. I can’t undo any of that, but I can be better. I need to be.”

Bronn steps up to him, forcing Jaime’s eyes forward. He’s close enough that Jaime has to fight the instinct to take a half-step back. “I don’t know what the fuck you think being better means, but I think it means doing some right where you’ve done wrong. That woman chose you,” Bronn says, very quietly. “She didn’t want that wildling from beyond the wall, or one of her father’s men, or someone handpicked by the Queen. She didn’t want me, or Red Ronnet Cuntington, or that squire you gave her. She chose you once, and you walked away from her, and yes, she may never forgive you for it if she finds out you live still. But if you wait here for years until you think you’ve become twice the man you were, you’ll have only yourself to blame when she does her duty and chooses a Lord who isn’t you.”

He’s not a fool, he knows that. The thought of Brienne with someone who isn’t him – with Tormund Giantsbane or some other Northman picked out by Sansa Stark, or anyone else, Brienne with that look in her eyes for anyone else – that aches, deep in his chest. But he says, “I pushed her away when I left her in Winterfell, and I did it so she could forget me. I can’t begrudge her now if she chooses someone else.”

Bronn throws up his hands. “Don’t you think you ought to show her there _is_ a choice?”

“I think she’d be right to never speak to me again. I think I don’t deserve to even walk the same ground as her,” Jaime says.

“Then fuck what you think, and fuck what you deserve,” Bronn says. “Fuck deserving! What are you so afraid of? You’re both alive. What’s so fucking hard about trying to be happy, too?”

Happiness – it hadn’t really occurred to him as an attainable pursuit, now. He’d had it for scant days in Winterfell, with a woman who he didn’t have to be ashamed to love. A woman he would have been glad to die for, not the bitter half-victory he’d felt when he thought he would die with Cersei. He’d had it in flashes, Brienne laughing in the firelight, Brienne flushed with wine and pleasure, Brienne defending his honor before the heirs to every Great House he’d ever wronged. He’d hoarded all of those moments as a shining shield against the dark, never thinking that he might one day have a chance at getting them back.

You don’t get to choose who you love. He still believes that. But maybe, he thinks, maybe you get to choose who you keep. You get to choose who you fight for, who you fight beside, and who you trust enough to fight at your back. You get to choose to walk forward and face whatever’s coming, or to keep inching away step by step.

He’s thought of her every day and still he hasn’t been able to move his feet, but he has a chance. A choice. What _is_ he so afraid of?

He clears his throat. “You’re right,” he says.

“Don’t you forget it.”

Jaime deserved that. He sets his jaw. “I need a horse,” he says.

“Luckily for your sorry hide,” Bronn says, grinning now, “I’m the proud Lord of a little place called Highgarden, and we have plenty of horses to spare, especially for one more chance to see a Lannister knocked off his feet.”

-

Jaime makes his goodbyes to the barkeep and sends a raven to Anders, assuming that it’ll get to Ymra eventually. Odd, to know that he’s found complete strangers and somehow convinced them to care for his wellbeing enough that he would feel guilty if he _didn’t_ tell them he’d left Oldtown. Charming people was always easy enough, but making genuine friends wasn’t something he used to do very often, or very well. It itches like new skin over a wound.

Take the time to feel the earth under your feet, Ymra had said, so Jaime takes Bronn’s horse only to Highgarden, where Bronn gives him a room to rest in for three nights and enough gold to buy food for the whole length of the Roseroad, claiming a previously unsubstantiated generosity.

It occurs to him there that he could follow the Searoad to a place he could still claim for his own if he wanted, but the notion fades just as quickly as it came. His heart pulls him forward, more and more insistent now that he’s started to walk. Perhaps Tyrion will name another Great House to preside over the Westerlands, one day, or maybe he’ll keep the castle for himself. But Jaime’s glad he’ll never be Lord Jaime Lannister of Casterly Rock. Might well never be Lord of anything, and isn’t particularly dismayed by it. Ambition has never been his strong point.

He turns away from the Sunset Sea and moves forward, crossing the Mander onto the long stretch of the Roseroad, and walks on.

-

A small party on horseback finds him breaking down camp in the Kingswood, and Jaime has his sword drawn before he sees a small, familiar figure hop down from a pony and march over to him.

“You are truly unbelievable, you know that?” Tyrion asks. The Hand’s pin glints on his chest.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Jaime says, putting his sword away and trying a smile. It feels strange on his face but better, easier than he expected.

Tyrion blinks, fighting a grin, and then drags Jaime down into a tight embrace. “I’m very glad you’re alive,” he says into Jaime’s shoulder, and then pushes him back. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Jaime repeats, solemn. “How did you know where to find me?”

Tyrion levels him with a look of pure disdain, and begins ticking off on his fingers. “Eleven months since the Battle of King’s Landing. Close to nine since anyone noticed some extremely experimental medicines had gone missing from where they had been stockpiled in the Keep. Seven months since a one-handed man going by the name of Arthur popped up in Oldtown asking about the wellbeing of the Hand and the Evenstar, of all people, and whether Tarth had rid itself of the Golden Company. Two since Bronn sent me a raven confirming that he offered a horse all the way to fucking Shipbreaker Bay, but you gave it back at Highgarden because you’re a glutton for punishment and because, I quote, ‘some crazy pirate bitch told him to walk.’”

“Don’t talk about Ymra that way,” Jaime says mildly.

Tyrion spreads his hands. “Eleven months, one hand, one hook – interesting to see that that’s not just a rumor, by the way, I do hope it’s an improvement in terms of usefulness – and only one place you could possibly be going. You didn’t make it very difficult.”

“I can see why they keep choosing you as the Hand,” Jaime says.

“Shut up,” Tyrion says. “Do you have a plan?”

Jaime grimaces. “I’ve tried not to have a plan since my last one got my sister killed and me almost killed and ruined the best thing in my life, probably permanently.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that was a plan, I thought it was a straightforward suicide mission,” Tyrion says, rolling his eyes. “This is why you ought to leave the planning to me.”

Jaime can’t resist a jab. “And what does the Hand of the Dragon Queen say, in his eternal wisdom?”

Tyrion raises an eyebrow, and then turns serious. “I say you’re an idiot,” he says.

“I think at this point everyone in Westeros knows that. Anything more helpful?”

Tyrion waves a hand at him. “Oh, I’m sure the extent of your planning is to grovel for the remainder of your days, and that’s certainly necessary,” he says. “But you must know that Tarth is still pulling itself back together after the havoc that the Golden Company brought there, and its Lady has gone back to help her people. She’s had other suitors and rejected them out of hand so far to focus on the rebuilding, but she has no heir and Evenfall is strategically critical to the defense of Westeros. Ser Brienne knows her duty, and eventually she’ll be obligated to do it.”

Jaime feels the ghost of his right hand try to clench a fist, and exhales, lets it go into the morning. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because duty can wait during peacetime when it cannot during war. And because I want to see you happy again,” Tyrion says simply. “You had it for all of five minutes. At least one of us ought to have it for a little longer.”

“I threw it away,” Jaime says.

“So get it back,” Tyrion says, as if it’s so easy. Maybe it is. “Take it for her.”

“I took it _from_ her.”

“You can give it back. You’re still alive. She’s still alive. You’re still cloyingly in love with her, don’t tell me you aren’t. We both know you’re going there to try, why are you pushing me to talk you out of it so close to the shore?”

Jaime frowns. He hadn’t even realized it, but Tyrion’s right. “I suppose I keep expecting the sword to come down again,” he admits. “Cersei’s been gone for a year and I keep waiting for the pain of being split in two, but it hasn’t come.”

Tyrion visibly thinks it over before beginning to speak. “When I found her in the rubble, at first I thought you would be there, as well. But we shifted all that stone and didn’t find you, so I thought, if Jaime isn’t here, maybe he escaped, even though the dinghy I had left at the exit to the tunnels hadn’t been moved. It drove me mad, for a while. There was barely any information coming from the other keeps, and what there was wasn’t about any one-handed Lannisters, it was about food, and soldiers, and reparations for the war. But still, I thought, my brother wouldn’t die like this. Not so easily as a beetle smashed by a rock.” He looks away. “Months passed, but I didn’t let myself mourn. To all of Westeros but me, Jaime Lannister was missing, presumed dead, but I couldn’t believe it. Then – well. You understand, I hear anything that might concern me someday, and when a one-handed man named Arthur with a sword and noble bearing began to ask after the health of the Hand in Oldtown, I heard it.”

“I thought I was being fairly discreet,” Jaime defends himself.

“You were most definitely not. ‘Arthur,’ Jaime, really?”

“I was with Dornish pirates, Arthur is a Dornish name,” Jaime says. “It seemed reasonable.”

Tyrion stares at him for a few seconds, and then regains his speech. “The point is, we’re what’s left of the Lannisters. You’re what’s left, and you don’t need the name, or the Rock, or any of it. The Queen has sworn to me that you won’t come to any harm unless you raise arms against her, and anyway, Ser Brienne pledged Tarth to the North and has acted as Queen Sansa’s emissary in the capital.”

“What are you trying to tell me? That I ought to bend the knee to the woman who murdered my sister and burned half of King’s Landing before I go a step further?” 

“I’m telling you that you’re free, Jaime. You needn’t bend the knee to anyone, I’ve made sure of it. You can spend years winning back Brienne of Tarth if that’s what you want, because you have years to spend.”

Jaime can’t think in years. He’s never been able to – he can think in as many months as it takes to coordinate a war on five fronts, he can measure time in the snail’s pace of troop movements, in horses and grain and supply lines. But his own future has never stretched in front of him for so long.

Tyrion peers at him. “What are you so afraid of?” he asks. Jaime hears Bronn’s voice two months ago on the road, echoing the question, and his own.

“I’m afraid that I deliberately ruined my one chance at happiness and there’s no coming back,” Jaime says at last, because it’s the truest answer he’s found.

He’s known since fucking Harrenhal that Brienne is the best of all of them. She moves, and all the knights from the stories shine through her. How is he supposed to live up to that brightness? To live with it, if she’ll have him? Those questions, he hasn’t thought of answers for yet, not wanting to tempt fate. He’s been hoping he can muddle through if he gets that far, and focusing on putting one foot in front of the other before then.

“Jaime,” Tyrion says, shaking him back to the present. “Tell me you’re going to do right by Brienne, and then go and do it.”

Jaime tries a smile. When they were children, Tyrion had been convinced of the binding power of words far more than Jaime. He’d make Jaime swear to steal him an extra sweet from the kitchens, or pledge to bring him a book from their father’s private library that Tyrion hadn’t been allowed into, and he’d believed with absolute certainty that Jaime would follow through once he’d said the words aloud, because Jaime always had, right up until he’d left to squire.

“Are you asking for an oath? You know I don’t do well with those.”

Tyrion sighs. “I’m asking you to try and be happy, for a change.”

The words slip out before Jaime can stop them. “Is it that easy?”

“It could be.”

Jaime looks away, towards the end of the forest, where he knows the sea begins. The morning is turning into day, but it’s still pleasantly cool in the shade of the trees.

“Alright,” he agrees.

They shake, left palm in left palm. “Good. One more thing,” Tyrion says, going back to where his two men are waiting – Jaime thinks one of them is the new Lord Baratheon, whose lands he’ll be traipsing through until he reaches the coast. He hazards a nod at the man, and is surprised to receive a cordial nod in return.

Tyrion comes to stand in front of Jaime again, and holds up a wrapped package that can only be one thing. “I thought you’d want it back,” he says, hopeful.

Jaime takes it with steadier fingers than he thought he’d manage and then he falls to his knees before his brother to crush him in an embrace. He’d thought it gone, had missed its melody in his hand, but it seems the world is conspiring to return again everything that he’d lost along the way.

He releases Tyrion and grins at him, holding back tears. “Tyrion,” he says. “Tyrion, what the fuck are we going to do with two Valyrian steel swords in Tarth, of all bloody places?”

Tyrion shrugs. “Shear sheep,” he suggests. “Look pompous. I’m hardly going to use it, and a Lannister sword belongs with a Lannister, even if that Lannister goes by another name now.”

Jaime straightens and sheathes the sword at his side, remembering the comforting weight of it. He squeezes Tyrion’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” Tyrion says. “And good luck.”


	5. Chapter 5

The sleepy fishing village at Amberly in the Rainwood pays little mind to a stranger with one hand, and even less when he pays what’s left of Bronn’s gold to a lobsterman for passage to Tarth.

The island is as beautiful as he’s heard it described – green and lush, the Straits of Tarth a deep gemstone blue pressing up against the land. An osprey circles overhead before diving into the water for a meal. Evenfall Hall rises from the rocky cliffs and the setting sun colors the sky in shades of Lannisport honey wine, and he understands with sudden perfect clarity how this place produced someone like Brienne.

He couldn’t say how long he spends looking at the keep and wondering if she’s there or somewhere else on the island, in the mountains that lie to the east or in the town he’s at the outskirts of, trying to force his feet to keep going just a little longer, before someone clears their throat behind him.

He turns to see Podrick Payne eyeing him warily. “Podrick,” Jaime says, nodding.

“Ser Podrick, now, actually,” Podrick corrects him, smiling with a sharper edge than Jaime had thought him capable of. Insolent, but Jaime supposes he deserves worse.

Jaime raises his eyebrows.

Podrick narrows his eyes, but then relents. “Lord Tyrion wrote to me and said you were coming, the raven came a few days ago.”

“He asked you very nicely not to kill me where I stand?” Jaime translates, amused now.

“He reminded me that he could still have me sent to the Wall even though I’m sworn to Tarth, and Tarth to the North,” Podrick admits. “If you’re looking for Lord Selwyn first, he’s in King’s Landing for trade negotiations over Tarth’s marble.”

Jaime winces. If Brienne allows him to stay, if she wants him anywhere near her, he’ll still owe an explanation to her father upon his return.

One step at a time, he reminds himself. One foot in front of the other. He’s made his choice. He made it long ago without even knowing it, buried alive and refusing to die and holding the image of blue eyes in his mind like a torch in the dark. There’s very little he wouldn’t do if Brienne asked it of him.

Podrick studies him. “Lord Selwyn is a good man,” he says. “He doesn’t pass judgment hastily.”

Easy to claim, difficult to prove, and Jaime knows he’d be found wanting even with an extended trial period. Still. “You know he’s not the first person I’m here to answer to,” Jaime says.

Podrick grins. “Was hoping to hear you say it, Ser Jaime. Ser Brienne has gone to the western forest to train. Follow the path for an hour and you’ll find her.”

Jaime closes his eyes briefly at the wave of – something. The very thought of Brienne nearby sets all his instincts alight. He takes a deep breath. “Thank you,” he says, turning to go. “Ser Podrick.”

“Wait,” Podrick says, and Jaime looks back in time to get hit in the face. Through the immediate pain he realizes that Podrick pulled his punch, so it’ll be a bruise but nothing is broken.

Jaime grinds his teeth and weighs hitting back but then thinks better of it, rubbing at his jaw.

“My Lady won’t thank me for it, and I know she can fight her own battles,” Podrick says. “But that was for making her cry.”

He feels faintly ill, and tamps it down. “I didn’t want her to mourn me,” Jaime says. It seems like a paltry excuse, now, where at the time it had been an urgent motivation.

“You’re an idiot,” Podrick says. He nods at the path. “Go on, then.”

Jaime goes.

-

The western path takes him through barley fields and past grazing sheep, along a low stone wall that ends where the green hills flow into the forest. The winter doesn’t seem to have touched any of the things growing here.

The crickets begin their evening chorus as he walks, and the wildflowers that grow at the side of the road remind him of the long summer in the Westerlands, before he’d ever worried about armies or knighthood or loyalty. He’s never set foot on Tarth before today, but he feels absurdly as if the land itself is more familiar than the whole of the Roseroad had been, and he’d traveled there a hundred times.

By the time he hears the soft swish of a sword in motion, the daylight is entirely gone, but he can smell the smoke of a campfire.

Brienne moves through a clearing in leather armor, slashing at countless imaginary enemies with Oathkeeper in a series of forms he can only assume the younger Stark girl taught her. She’s modified them for a different sword, but they still echo the Braavosi techniques he’s seen, smooth as silk and perfectly deadly. He aches to look at her.

He watches her for long minutes in the firelight before she turns and notices him, and her face lights up with happiness and relief and something Jaime won’t name for fear of being wrong before she closes it up again and goes blank. Jaime feels the change in his chest. Maybe she doesn’t know that he would give almost anything to get that smile back, that he was the stupidest man in the Seven Kingdoms to walk away from it.

“Ser Jaime,” Brienne says.

“Ser Brienne,” Jaime replies.

She must see something in his face, because she looks away as if she can’t bear it. Her knuckles are white on Oathkeeper’s hilt.

She meets his eyes again, and he knows he looks like the besotted fool people keep accusing him of being with the way he’s been staring, but he’ll make no apology for it. He could stare at her for the rest of his life, he thinks, even if she only allows it from afar. “Brienne,” he begins again, barely knowing what he’s about to say. “I—”

“Draw your sword, then, Ser,” Brienne cuts him off.

He wishes that she’d say his name at least once more. “I won’t fight you,” he says, mustering a smile. “I’ll lose. I would lose even if I still had both hands.”

“Draw your sword,” she repeats. “Or should I say it again?”

That’s not a tone Jaime wants to test. “As my Lady commands,” he says, and draws his sword.

Brienne lunges at him as soon as he gets his blade up, their swords meeting again for the first time in a year. Widow’s Wail sings in Jaime’s hand, a high harmony with Oathkeeper, and he loses himself in the dance of it. Brienne has somehow gotten better than she’d been in Winterfell, while Jaime’s spent months teaching basic forms to a child, and his left hand has never gotten as good as his right was. He isn’t expecting to last very long, even though Brienne must be tired from training all day.

Still, the dance is sweeter than he’s remembered, and he does have a few new tricks. Surprise flits across Brienne’s features the first time he turns Oathkeeper aside with his hook, but she accounts for it quickly and doesn’t let him get an opening like that again. He hasn’t felt this pure exhilaration in a long time. Their swords come together and spring apart, a cycle that goes on and on, stretching into the song of steel clashing against steel, ringing out into the night.

Brienne presses every advantage, and soon it’s all Jaime can do to stay on his feet, and then she finally knocks Widow’s Wail from his hand and follows him down when he stumbles to the ground. She puts Oathkeeper’s blade to his neck, and he freezes.

“Jaime,” she whispers above him. His name, again.

“Brienne,” he says.

“Do you have any idea how angry I was?”

Jaime looks away. “I thought it would be better – you could find someone better—”

“ _That wasn’t your choice to make!”_

They’re both breathing heavily, Brienne still holding Oathkeeper at his throat, her hands steady like she’s never wavered a day in her life because she hasn’t, because she’s the truest woman in all of fucking Westeros. He swallows. If the sword-edge were a hair closer, he would be bleeding already. All knights must bleed, Arthur Dayne had told him once.

“I know. I’m sorry,” he says. It sounds like _I yield_ to his own ears, it sounds like _I’m glad to yield to you, I would be glad to yield to you every day for the rest of my life,_ but perhaps she can’t hear it.

“You are the greatest idiot I have ever known, Jaime Lannister,” says Brienne.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “Brienne, I am sorry.”

She leans back and puts the sword down, watching him the whole while. Her eyes are so blue – in the dark, when he’d been buried under stone, he’d thought of her eyes and hadn’t known why, or he’d known why but denied it like a coward. He’d crawled forward on his knees thinking of that summer sky that called him, hearing that voice in the bells. He fought through the Long Night for those eyes; he lived through filth and ash and months at unfamiliar sea, a year without the name that made him, clinging to the memory of her eyes looking at him like he deserved a fraction of the happiness she was offering.

“I thought you were dead,” she says.

“I almost was. I wanted to be.”

“Do you still?”

“Sometimes,” Jaime admits. “Not as often.” He hesitates, and then decides to tell the truth. “Then I think of you telling me to live, in the forest with the Bloody Mummers. It helps.”

“Jaime,” Brienne says.

“It helps immensely.”

He’d forgotten the way her emotions play out on her face for him, heartbreak and loneliness and bone-deep yearning. Surely she can see the longing in her eyes mirrored in his own? “Jaime,” she says again. “I thought you were _dead_.”

“I know,” Jaime says, the words rushing out. “I’m sorry. I had hoped you wouldn’t mourn. I hurt you because I knew I was going to my death, and I didn’t want you to grieve for me, I’ve never been worth your grief, but I still hurt you, and I’m sorry.”

Brienne considers him. “I could kill you myself for that.”

“I would welcome it at your hands, Ser. I would know it was deserved.”

“Gods, you and _deserving_. You’re so – Jaime,” she says. It sounds like an oath, this time. Oh, he’d missed every intonation her voice gave his name. He could listen to it forever. He hadn’t missed the sound of Jaime when he’d been Arthur except when he’d remembered her mouth shaping the word.

“I am,” he agrees.

She moves off of him and he wants to pull her back immediately, to never let go. How had he lived without this for so many months? He should have taken Bronn’s horse and galloped the whole Roseroad, no matter any sound advice from wise pirate women. He should have pleaded with Ymra for passage to Tarth a year ago, broken ribs and broken vows be damned. He feels the extra time as keenly as a blade. What a fool he’s been.

Her hair obscures her features, the slick worn out of it with the day’s end. He sits up, daring to reach out and tuck a strand behind her ear so he can meet her gaze.

She weathers his touch with the slightest shiver. Gods, he’s missed her. “Why are you here?” she asks.

He thinks of Winterfell, more than a year and a lifetime ago. He thinks of Harrenhal, and Riverrun, and King’s Landing, and always the blue of her eyes piercing him through. “I’m here because I couldn’t say it then,” Jaime says. “And I need to say it now, because I spent months trying to think of a way to say it better and I haven’t, so I’ll say it the way I can: I’m sorry. I love you, I loved you before Winterfell and I loved you after the Long Night and I loved you when I left, and I was lying when I said that I didn’t, because I was afraid. I don’t expect your forgiveness, I’ve done nothing to deserve it. I don’t expect you to fall into my arms and say you love me still. I’m here only to beg your leave to stay at your side for as long as it takes to earn a place there, in any way you’ll have me.” He pauses. “If you’ll consent to have me at all. I can wait. I’ve been reliably informed I have years in front of me to do with as I will, and all I will is to be here with you. Whatever you see fit to grant me, I will hold onto. I swear it, Brienne. I know my vows can’t mean much, but I’ll swear any you want.”

Brienne closes her eyes briefly, as if struck by a blow. It takes every ounce of willpower he has left not to put his arms around her. The breeze murmurs around them.

“You great bloody fool,” Brienne says at last, voice thick. “You impossible man. You’re always saying such ridiculous things, like you think you’re some knight from the songs.”

“You and I both know I’m not a knight from the songs.”

“I know,” Brienne says. “You’re real.”

“I would say there are other significant differences,” Jaime says.

“Shut up.”

The fire crackles. Brienne just looks at him, saying nothing more, the flame sending light and shadows dancing across her face.

“Ser Brienne,” Jaime says. “My Lady of Tarth. May I stay here, with you? If you’d rather never see me again and forget me completely, I understand, although I confess I’ll be wildly jealous of whichever man you choose to make Lord of Tarth.”

She exhales evenly, and looks up at the night sky as if to search the constellations for an answer. He waits, heart trying to beat its way out of his ribcage. He thinks of diving headfirst from a cliff for a few stolen moments of flight.

She seems to find something up there, because then she turns back to Jaime, puts careful hands on his face and presses a firm kiss to his lips. The callouses on her right palm are still the same, he thinks, and the gentleness. His fingers tangle in her hair. How did he ever manage to let go, before?

They part, and he’s glad to be sitting because he doesn’t think his legs could hold him. One simple kiss and he’s unbalanced as a green squire.

“Jaime,” she says softly. “Don’t you know I couldn’t forget you if I tried?”

Something lights up in his chest, fills him with blue starlight. “I can stay?”

“You’d better,” Brienne says. “And don’t be jealous of anyone, it’s unbecoming of the consort of the heir to Evenfall.”

Jaime is struck speechless for perhaps the third time in his life.

Brienne eyes him. “You asked to stay at my side,” she says. “What were you expecting?”

He expected what he deserved, he expected the sword to finally fall and send him into a world of pain he’d never be able to recover from. Instead, he’s not only been granted an indefinite stay of execution but also all the happiness that he hadn’t been bold enough to even hope for.

“Asking for more than the right to be near you felt like tempting the gods, you know,” Jaime says. “And here you are, offering it to me like I’m somehow worthy of staying with you on your beautiful island even after the life I’ve lived, just because I happen to love you beyond all reason.”

They’re close enough that he can hear the barely-there catch in her breath. “You’ve proven your worth twenty times over to me. You needn’t be so dramatic about it,” she says.

“But you love me anyway.”

“Of course I do,” she says. “I never stopped.”

Jaime smiles. “Well,” he says. “I suppose that makes two of us.”  

Brienne smiles back, true and lovely, and Jaime finally lets himself feel it: a soaring joy, burning like a star in the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, thank you, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the ride. Come find me yelling [here](http://keensers.tumblr.com/) on tumblr, where you're welcome to yell with me.


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